He Warsaw ghetto it was the largest Jewish ghetto established in Europe by the Nazis. It was conceived as a place of transit for deportations to a final destination: the Treblinka extermination camp. In 1943, a small group of teenagers led by Mordechai Anilevich he prepared to do battle against thousands of German soldiers, with the idea that if they could not live in freedom they would at least choose how they were going to die.
The facts of this story are accurately reconstructed by the Hispanic-Mexican writer and union activist Paco Ignacio Taibo II in “We know how we are going to die,” published by an editorial Planet. In an interview with PROFILEthe author told how he learned about the history of the young rebels and explained that there are issues from the past that are repeated today.
Taibo, who was appointed in 2019 as director of the Fund of Economic Culture by the mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obradoralso gave details about the missions of this non-profit publishing group and partially supported by the State when it comes to playing a social role.
Juan Pablo Meneses: “Chile has become a country that has no truths, it has versions”
How did the idea of writing this book come about? I understand that curiosity is a good engine.
Unsatisfied curiosities are the great engine of a writer. If it interests you a lot, if you are to blame for not writing it… I did not want to die without having written this book. It was a debt that I accumulated throughout my life; the first time i came in contact with Mordejai Anilevich, the protagonist of the bookwas 16 years old.
I came across a brochure in a Jewish youth club in Mexico City that had a wonderful library. I was there not being a Jew trying to win over a jewish girlfriend. I couldn’t with my girlfriend, but I could with the library and I became a regular reader. This is how I came to the brochure whose phrase haunted me forever: “We know how we are going to die.”
How did that phrase keep coming back to her mind?
I was beginning to be a member of the Left at that time. I was accumulating it: suddenly I traveled to the Warsaw Book Fair and saw Mordejai’s tomb, then I found documents about the Latvian SS and I was “making a closet”, as we would say in Mexico. That closet started to grow.
During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic I had time and thought: ‘Aha, I have a book and I know how I want it to be’: tight, brief texts, not one more about the Holocaust but about the epic of 150 young people who they decide they know how they are going to die and yet they make an insurrection in the Warsaw ghetto with four pistols and eight bottles of gasoline against four thousand SS agents, tanks and planes.
Something that stands out is that Anilevich was a scout, it doesn’t seem like he had much training on weapons…
Not at all, at most they knew how to cure scrapes on your knee by putting mercury and chromium on you. But the logic of interwar scouting was very important when I discovered it, because it is the genesis of this Jewish fighting organization: it was absolutely mixed, men and women.
In hierarchical, very macho and patriarchal societies, it was a complete break for the time. So much so that among the combatants half are women. And I mean fighters with pistols, machine guns and the most dangerous tasks, like leaving the ghetto.
Was this story “hidden” or was there not much material because it had not been researched?
In the original story there are too many fault of western countries of not having supported the ghetto, in fact in one chapter I tell how the representative of the Jewish organizations in England committed suicide. It is the fault of the Poles for not having supported the ghetto; first they allowed it to be created, then they were isolated, then they were locked up and finally they were mass murdered at the rate of four trains a day.
This story was not something that should not be airing the guilt of the winners. In later years, a debate was opened in Israel around the another current that fought in the ghetto, Betarthe most conservative, and decreased importance of this Jewish teen organization. As Israel became a more militaristic state, it was more likeable to tell more epic and less progressive stories.
Think about something, a month before the uprising these teenagers meet in a basement and sing the “Internationale”. They were real socialists, not pro-Soviet because they don’t like Stalinism at all, but they are socialists and so this story hid for the second time.
More than 70 years have passed and there are still people who continue to deny the Holocaust…
That thought, the reactionary fascist, it is generated by idiots, I will not be able to save any denier. They are the ones who keep saying that the Earth is flat… Well, when they reach the edge they will fall.
They are not my readers, nor do I want them, nor am I going to win over almost any of them. No, my readers are between 18 and 30 years old, they are young and clueless and they admire Spider-Man, which I don’t think is bad.
resurgence of fascism
What do you think about the phrase that Joaquín Sabina said a few months ago, about the fact that the Latin American Left is adrift and that breaks your heart?
Because he doesn’t know anything… the last time I was with him six months ago I told him: ‘Joaquín, you don’t understand anything, the next time you go to Mexico stop going to canteens and come to my house and we’ll tell you.’ And he strikes me as a charming, brilliant, wonderful guy who doesn’t talk to the right people.
He has no perception because he reads Spanish newspapers. And if you don’t want to know what’s happening in Latin America, read Spanish newspapers.
Also in some places in Europe there was a resurgence of fascism in governments, such as in Italy.
Yes, also in Hungary and Poland. And there they broke Mordechai’s tomb, I tell it briefly in the book, because it’s another story.
It’s another story, but we see how those things from the past continue today, it seems that they never close…
They never close and they always are. History is not vertical, nor rising. It is pendulous, it comes and goes and it has curves.
Why do you think this resurgence is taking place?
It is a neural problem, there is too many neanderthal genes in humans they are regressive. Explain why when Argentines win a World Cup they climb trees and fall. I was a clear defender of Argentina a Qatar 2022I had no doubt. I applauded, shouted and everything, but the images that fascinated me were the interest that Mexican television took in those who fell from the trees.
But there were some that were great. There were four who got on a traffic light and they go to hell with the post and everything. So I said… there is a recessive gene in Argentines with a Neanderthal character that caused them to climb trees. I watched with fascination as a side phenomenon.
Fund of Economic Culture
What is the Fondo de Cultura Económica and how do you prevent it from interfering with your work as a writer?
I work 14 hours a day and then I write at night. This is how I arranged it when I spoke with Andrés Manuel López Obrador. I told, I accept but I put three conditions: The first was that I was not going to stop writing. The second, that I was not going to moderate my political opinions. And the third, that I am very foul-mouthed; And I’m not going to prevent myself from saying “that right-wing journalist is a son of a bitch” because I can’t, it’s not in my ability to be a politically correct public official.
He Bottom is a company with Mexican state capital and own capital product of the sale of his books, which have offices in 11 Latin American countries and publishes a book and a half daily. There are 115 bookstores in Mexico and twenty-odd others in the rest of Latin America, has 12 thousand reading clubs and mobile bookstores that travel to the furthest points of the country. It has a chain of Fomento de Debate that spends a lot of time debating the history of Mexico and the history of Latin America, very Latin Americanist.
I defined the latter as such when I arrived at the Fund, I said that this is the first left-wing transnational what is in the world I know that many will not like it, screw them, because they would have won the elections. So, since I am a Guevarist and a Bolivarian, and a little anarchist from time to time, they gave me the mission of directing it and I am going to direct it according to this logic, without concessions to neoliberalism and the market company.
But it is a publisher that sells books in the market.
Exact. So you have to play the enterprise and the social enterprise simultaneously. And what missions do you have? Getting the books to those who don’t have money to buy them, getting them there and lowering the price of the books was the great battle that I’ve spent four years in Mexico and that I’ve won. Now we have to win it in the rest of Latin America, it is important to lower the price of books.
CP